Author: samjshah

I survived Parent Night

Even though I was sick — aching and tired — I survived our Parent’s Night last week. I think it was pretty successful, even though I was foiled a few times by parents who tricked me into talking about their children. (I keep a general policy not to talk about individual kids at these events; it’s a time to share what we do in the classroom, introduce myself to parents, and to tell parents what their kids can do to be successful — and how they can help their kids be successful).  I’m still baffled on how they tricked me. I totally blame my weak immune system for my inability to steer conversation away from talking about little Jane or little Jake.

The night had one tragedy — when SmartBoard didn’t work for one of my classes. I knew this would happen; the same thing happened last year. I even told everyone I knew it would happen again. However, luckily, it happened when talking to the parents of my four student multivariable class. The parents all knew each other — these kids had been in the same classes for gosh knows how long — and so we just gathered ’round my laptop and I showed them what sorts of things go on in our class.

Some observations:

(1) Parents tend to start off the night stoic. Their faces won’t let anything through. Cracking jokes or smiling doesn’t phase them. As the night progresses, however, the parents get more laid back, and by our last class, parents have let their guard down. I swear I heard a few of them laugh in my last presentation. I’ve asked other teachers in my school if they have noticed this phenomenon, and it seems pretty universal.

(2) Parents like to introduce themselves (great). Parents like to follow that up by asking “how’s my kid doing?” (not great). First of all, as I said, I don’t like to talk about individual students. Second of all, who is your kid again? Believe me, unless you say “we’re the parents of Joe Schmo,” every time you meet me, I’m not going to know who you are.

(3) I realized I go into these nights actually expecting some gratitude from parents. And when I didn’t get it from more than a handful of parents, I felt a little slighted. Am I a bad teacher for needing those bits of affirmation? I don’t know. But I can’t help how I feel, and that’s what I felt.

(4) One point I made to almost all my parents is the basis for how I approach designing any class: I try to get them to do work which I think is just beyond the level that they think they can do. Of course, I’m not always successful with this, but I do try to push my students just past their perceived limits. Gauging their limits is tough though. I’m doing a really good job with this in Multivariable Calculus this year, but at the moment, I don’t think I’m pushing my Algebra II or Calculus classes enough.

With that, I’m going to eat an apple, and get me to bed, and hope to be ready tomorrow to embark on yet another week.

Parent Night is Almost Upon Us

We have “parent night” on Thursday and there are five things I have to remind myself to do:

  1. Plan to speak for 15 minutes, even though I only have 10 minutes with them. That way you can go “oops, I guess I’m out of time” and send everyone along.
  2. Integrate humor into the presentation.
  3. Talk about the content of the class, the expectations I put on students, the expectations I put on myself, and anticipating any parent questions and addressing them in the presentation (e.g. do I ever allow extra credit? no.)
  4. Do NOT let any parent ask me questions about their individual child. Politely say “I don’t think tonight is the best night to have conversations about individual children. However, I’d be happy to set up a conversation! Here’s my contact info.”
  5. Don’t freak out!

College Recommendations

I’m being asked to write college recommendations. I have a hard time with this, because I view it as such an important responsibility. The colleges my students are applying to are often prettycompetitive and every part of the application is important.

My strategy for dealing with this is to send students desiring a recommendation the following paragraph:

When you have all your colleges picked and the forms gathered, will you give me the forms paperclipped to stamped and addressed envelopes? It would be good to have them at least two weeks in advance of when you want them sent out. That way I can do them all in one fell swoop. Also, when I write recommendations, I usually ask students for two things: (1) things you want me to highlight in your recommendation [math or non-math related], and (2) for you to write a sample recommendation for yourself. Why? Well simply put, it is this: recommendations become strong recommendations if there are lots of specific details/specific instances/stories. And you know things I wouldn’t know — like if you formed a study group or something. Don’t feel like you need to be humble. Just write it honestly and with confidence.

I’ve talked to some teachers who have a form they give to students, questions students need to answer about their experience in the class(es) they had with the teacher.

Do any of you do something that makes writing these recommendations easier? Do you have any suggestions about how to write a strong and honest recommendation?

CD Club Pedagogy?

One weekend ago, I had the fourth cycle of the CD club I organize. It rocked. (You can read about a previous cycle here.) The general idea: a group of 10-15 people meet up at a local watering hole and bring a mix cd they’ve created around a theme. In fact, everyone brings 10-15 copies of their mix, and when we’re all gathered, we exchange them.

The end result: you get 10-15 cds filled with really good music.

The last four themes were:

1. No Theme
2. The Academic Colon: A CD About Some Aspect Of Education
3. Time Travel
4. Stages Of A Relationship

(You can see the tracklistings for each of my four CDs here.)

There is something really awesome about this set up: the work you put into creating and reproducing one thing comes back to you ten fold. And you get to — and want to — engage with everyone else’s work.

Is there any way to harness this model of intellectual exchange in the classroom? To reverse engineer it?

The two key points:

The object needs to be coveted by all participants (e.g. carefully crafted CDs)
The object needs to be easily reproducible (e.g. copy CDs)

Ummm. The best example just popped in my head: VALENTINES DAY CARDS IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL!

Or a slight variation:

Can we come up with an single large entity that students individually contribute to? So students have ownership in it?

So in the mix CD example: if every person chose a song on a theme — and we made a CD — we’d have a single CD with input from all. Or if we were making a bulletin board, we could have each student bring in one picture to contribute to it.

Before signing off, I thought I’d share one idea that might be useful. Before a big assessment, I could ask students to each make a one-page set of study questions they created, along with their solutions. I could scan them in for students to use to study from. For students, by students. And for the assessment itself, Icould  chose some of the good problems from the study guides to be on it.

Other ideas? Is there a good math project out there that fits this CD club model?

Our New Algebra II Curriculum

This year, my math department has changed radically from last year. Among the many changes is a revamping of the Algebra II curriculum. Not only are we adding new topics, but we’ve removed a whole bunch of what we traditionally taught — pushing it to precalculus, I suppose. The course is totally reordered. For our first quarter, we are covering:

Unit 1: Number Lines, Intervals, and Sets

1.Set notation and interval notation (along with union, intersection, and subset)

2.Linear inequalities –graph on a number line

3.Compound inequalities

4.Absolute value inequalities

Unit II: Algebraic Manipulation: Rational Expressions and Exponents

1.Factoring two, three, and four term polynomials

2.Review of basic exponent rules and simplification

3.Polynomial addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division

4.Rational expression addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division

Unit III: Radical Equations

1.Review properties of radicals (integer exponents)

2.Simplifying radicals with exponents under them

3.Solving radical equations

This seems very hodge-podgy to me, now that we’re going through it for the first time. One day we’re talking about sets and subsets, the next how to solve 2|2x-1|-3<5. We are doing a lot without the textbook (which I’m fine with), but every so often we’re turning to the middle of the textbook to cover a topic (e.g. compound inequalities and absolute value inequalities come at the end of chapter 3). It just feels fractured. Why am I concerned?

I don’t know. I can’t articulate it. It’s just a whole bunch of thoughts running through my head…

We haven’t started graphing, and that makes me nervous. I’m now feeling like we’ve cut out too much of the curriculum in quarters three and four to cover this stuff. I don’t see the natural flow in this beginning material, as I saw the natural flow in our old curriculum (functions and lines; quadratics; polynomials; rational functions; exponentials and logarithms; trigonometry).

However I’m hoping that the past month and a half — which seems like a lot of vamping before we get to the good stuff — is worth it, because it does force students to practice their basic algebra skills. 

If there are any other Algebra II teachers out there: how do you start the course? And do you like it (equivalently put: does it work)?

In non-AP calculus — since I get to cover what I like at the pace I like — I focused the past month and a half specifically on the skills that my students last year had difficulty with: visualizing basic functions including logs and exponents, solving logarithmic and exponential equations, solving trigonometric equations, and knowing trig values at special angles. This too is totally different than what I did last year, where as a new teacher I just forged through our book. But let me tell you — unlike with Algebra II — I am certain that all this review is going to do some good, because I remembered some of the wounds my students suffered last year, and I am applying extra padding in those same areas to my students this year. 

 

Tough Day

Today was a tough day. The toughest so far this year.

Fielding parent calls, communicating with administrators, getting questioned by administrators, having issues with my computer, not having a lunch. Yargh. My classes were awesome, though, but even that wasn’t enough today, when I felt boxed in from all sides.

All I wanted was a giant hug, and someone to tell me that I’m good at what I do, and they respect and support me as a teacher.